From Active Shooter To Inactive Congress: What Our First Responders Can Teach The GOP About Heroics

The Washington Post is now confirming that the reports of an active shooter at Joint Base Andrewsare unfounded and were in fact a result of a mistake someone made related to a routine procedure.

In all of these active shooter situations, crowds are sent into a state of confusion, which spreads to the authorities who can only activate some kind of emergency management procedure which only alerts the press who distribute the confusion to the rest of the world in rapid succession.

Not to mention the kind of confusion that’s created by-the-bulk when one active shooter attack follows another, exhausting our ability to function or think without a heightened level of stress. Debating it on social media also only seems to makes it worse.

How The Active Shooter Forces Us To Think

What this eventually comes down to is that it forces us to consider two realities; one where we’re constantly terrorized by these active shooters, massacres, or other violent incidents and the other; where we find some way to consistently deal with them such as accept a certain type of ideology that allows us to blame our leadership, or find another type of consistency which will allow us to simply walk away from it — and still feel good about it — accepting that we might not have something to fear after all, or at the worst that there might not be anything we can do about it.

If you read into these two realities presented, we could also break it down a step further into two groups which hold two currently active political ideologies. One being the one that blames the black-man in the White House, 24-hours a day no matter what he says or does (or doesn’t do). And the other, accepting that restrictions can be enforced through the law.

But the difference between these two political ideologies — one being the conservative and the other being progressive — is that one of them is not willing to do more when these active shooters (who might also become suicide bombers afterwards as we’ve seen with the recent attack in Istanbul) make the headlines. We can leave those who have walked away from the issues (perhaps we’ll call them libertarians) out of this scenario since ideologically, they prefer to stay out of it.

Republicans in Congress know people want them to do something about it, but they refuse to under the fear that any kind of legislation will provide some historical precedent being set. And particularly if that legislation is taking place with a Democratic President, much less an historic President like Obama, because they want to deny him any legacy of success.

We’ll Never Be Completely Safe

In the recent Istanbul airport attacks, media sources are saying that the airport was one of the more secure airports in the world. However, the overwhelmingly violent nature of the active shooters and the fact that they detonated explosives already annihilates all illusions that the airport was secure at all. And so the knee-jerk reaction or the global impulse is that it was not secure enough.

One should pay special attention to this argument, where one group of leaders might politicize the message that it was not secure enough and look to blame the opposite party. But more specifically they point fingers at the other for suggesting that more could be done. And then they also hijack the same idea that it was not secure enough when they too have an argument to make when it’s convenient for them.

One should also not forget that while there is division among the civilians, the actual solutions to these active shooter incidents take place where they happen, where they confront a unpredictable threat. Which is more than one can say about our Republican-led congress, who cower under the presence of the NRA, shoving fistfuls of filthy lucre into the dark void of the deepest pockets.

Without going further in depth, we can already see we’ve come to another point of confusion, created around these active shooter scenarios. But what we need to open our eyes to is the fact that the real threat is not the occurrence of terrorist attacks, but the political obstruction of throwing blame around, stifling any real action against further attacks.